Toronto After Dark 2026 Review: My love for you is deep but the devil loves me deeper

Alice, in her 20s, is a dreamer.

She wants true love, intense love, reciprocated love. But she doesn’t like going to clubs with her girlfriends, and her current boyfriend clearly doesn’t like her either. We can hear his voice on the phone before he cruelly abandons her himself.

But she’s willing to do anything to make this happen with her next colleague, including making a pact with the devil, a young, attractive, bright-eyed man who prefers a booth in the back of the local dive bar. That would be a tall, dark, slightly dark Luke. Luke is a goth-adjacent photographer with a drawl and a voice that would horrify Ryan Gosling.

Of course, the pact with the devil involves Alice throwing up mystical knives and developing an insatiable hunger for blood and penetration.

My love for you is deep, but the devil loves me even deeper. The pink glowing heart is primarily an aesthetic experience. Built from the ground up to resemble the modest-budget made-for-TV movies of the early 2000s, it was shot on an iconic camera of the era (the Panasonic DBX100B) and framed in a striking pan-and-scan aspect ratio. The film begins with a cable TV bumper before the credits. The pacing is intentionally stilted, as if they’re trying to hit 90 minutes to fulfill cable programming obligations.

Sometimes done for less than $100,000, these DIY experiments fall somewhere between serious and frankly sexual horror. twin peaksAnd the pop rock candy music videos of that era. It is a cheap erotic vampire horror that has appeared since the 2000s. burpee-Characters seen in the same TV show I saw the TV light. It’s a fever dream of lap dissolve transitions and highly saturated color palettes that evoke movie remix culture and the VHS noise-fests of RacerTrash and its descendants, but it still stands on its own. Scenes such as city streets at night are often shot in dark scenes that fit the limitations of miniDV.

At one point, we overhear Alice experiencing the pain of possession, where the camera pans in a way that conveys her pain in a way that only film can. Otherwise, it’s debatable whether the acting is particularly mannered and intentional or not, but it certainly fits the Cinemax (or Showtime AfterHours, if you’re into that kind of thing) energy and has a more mystical vibe to it. This mainly hinders compositing and the post-production room where the real magic happens.

The intent and execution here astutely fulfills director Casey Donahue’s mission statement. That means emulating the experience of stumbling across something strange on 24-hour cable in the wee hours of the morning and simply going with the flow of mild insomnia and excitement of unrequited love. Are they empty calories? confident. But the sugar rush is undeniable.

The film was screened at the 2026 Toronto After Dark Film Festival.